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“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.”

— Warren Buffett

The wisdom of Warren Buffett reflects a value-based philosophy about investing that says investors are buying shares in a business, and encourages strategic thinking about investment time horizon. Before placing a buy order for a stock, a great question we can ask is whether we would still be comfortable making the investment if we couldn’t sell it for many years?

A “buy-and-hold” approach may call for a time horizon that spans a long period of time — maybe even lasting for a decade-long holding period. Suppose such a “buy-and-hold” investor had looked into buying shares of Agilent Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: A) back in 2009. Let’s take a look at how such an investment would have worked out for that buy-and-hold investor:

Start date: 09/11/2009
$10,000

09/11/2009
$40,120

09/10/2019
End date: 09/10/2019
Start price/share: $20.06
End price/share: $74.77
Starting shares: 498.50
Ending shares: 536.47
Dividends reinvested/share: $3.40
Total return: 301.12%
Average annual return: 14.90%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $40,120.43

The above analysis shows the decade-long investment result worked out quite well, with an annualized rate of return of 14.90%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 10 years ago into $40,120.43 today (as of 09/10/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 301.12% (something to think about: how might A shares perform over the next 10 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Always an important consideration with a dividend-paying company is: should we reinvest our dividends?Over the past 10 years, Agilent Technologies, Inc. has paid $3.40/share in dividends. For the above analysis, we assume that the investor reinvests dividends into new shares of stock (for the above calculations, the reinvestment is performed using closing price on ex-div date for that dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of .656/share, we calculate that A has a current yield of approximately 0.88%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of .656 against the original $20.06/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 4.39%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“I rarely think the market is right. I believe non-dividend stocks aren’t much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.” — Mark Cuban